What Will It Take to Make A Woman President?: Conversations About Women, Leadership and Power (55 page)

ELEANOR SMEAL

“When you see more and more women in leadership, it helps to build and put more and more women in leadership. When I was a kid, you couldn’t
imagine
a woman senator. Now it is commonplace. We’re still only 20 percent. That’s not good, but still, there are more, so you are more likely to see it. . . . You see more women in economic leadership positions, you see more women in political leadership and presidents of universities. Our numbers are going up; they aren’t what they should be, but they’re going up. . . . We will have a president soon, a woman president, and then for all those people it breaks
that
barrier. That will happen. I think sooner, rather than later.”

A
S COFOUNDER AND
president of the Feminist Majority Foundation and former president of the National Organization for Women, Eleanor Smeal has led efforts for the economic, political, and social equality and empowerment of women worldwide for over three decades. She has been an activist leader in the passage of landmark legislation, such as the Pregnancy Discrimination Act, Equal Credit Act, Civil Rights Restoration Act, Violence Against Women Act, and Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances Act. Smeal also led the fight for the U.S. ratification of the Equal Rights Amendment (1977–1982). She has pushed to make Social Security and pensions more equitable for women as well as campaigned to close the wage gap and to achieve pay equity.

Smeal serves on a number of boards, including the National Council for Research on Women, the National Organization for Women, the Executive Committee of the National Council of Women’s Organizations, and the Leadership Circle of the Alliance for Ratification of CEDAW. She is also a Phi Beta Kappa graduate of Duke University and holds an MA degree from the University of Florida. She received an honorary Doctor of Law from Duke University, an honorary Doctor of Science from the University of Florida, and an honorary Doctor of Humane Letters from Rutgers, the state university of New Jersey.

MARIANNE SCHNALL
: Why do you think we’ve not yet had a woman president? What do you think it will take to make that happen?

ELEANOR SMEAL
: Until really the seventies, we hardly had a woman member of the Senate or Congress. We didn’t really get to 10 percent of Congress until 1992, so I’m just using that as a barometer. And if you look at all the states, we really do not have that many governors either, at any one time—like, it’s a big deal if we have four, or something. So the whole position of women in politics has not been in a parity position, or an equal position. I think it is an outgrowth of the massive discrimination against women. We get the vote in 1920, but we’re really not voting in equal numbers until the sixties. I mean, the women’s movement takes off, but there are so many things to fight. The political movement for women, for elective office, in an organized way, doesn’t really begin until the eighties. And given the rules . . . the scale is still very tipped against newcomers. In the first place, we have a geographic basis, which is very, very gerrymandered—and we’re used to being gerrymandered. Not enough people question the Senate. You have two senators from South Dakota and two
from California, so the reality is—and I can go on like that—you have a gerrymandered Congress, in the Senate and the House, and state legislatures. And you have this system of voting that is first past the post. What I mean by that is that it prevents the formation of many political parties. It favors the way the votes are counted and the establishment of only two major parties. And the systems in which women have become increasingly powerful, they’re
all
parliamentary systems in which you have many parties, and more competition.

So there are many, many factors; it isn’t one. We have challenged a lot of them. One of the reasons we have better representation now in, for example, the Democratic Party, is that we sued them. A lot of people don’t know this, but the National Organization for Women and the National Women’s Political Caucus led a campaign that began in the seventies, and we were successful in 1984 with a lawsuit—it starts in the mid-seventies and we finally win in the eighties. But the reason for the campaign was that we sued for equal representation in all political committees and bodies of the Democratic Party. I was very much involved in that. And it helped a lot. And that included electors for the conventions, so the National Convention, which used to be a male show, in reality, has become now extremely integrated—it has equal representation—but it’s not just that level, it’s
all
levels of the Democratic Party. We tried to do it on the Republican side, but the Republican rules are even worse. There are very few ways of doing it there. But the impact of our winning on the Democratic side is that they were embarrassed to not include more women on the Republican side, but still, there’s far more representation on the Democratic side.

So step by step we discovered the gender gap. I did in 1980, and have used that for gaining more power for women. But actually the Scandinavians, because of their electoral system, were able to use it even more. I travelled at one time, literally all throughout Europe to find out
how is it that they got these quota systems in Parliament. And they said, “You guys were responsible for it, to a degree, because when you said there was a gender gap there, we went to look for our gender gap and realized that women were voting more conservatively.” And then they used it as a lever to change the left parties and increase representation.

MS
: In terms of a woman president, we’ve been hearing a lot of talk about 2016 and whether it’s going to be Hillary. Aside from the structural obstacles that are there, do you think we’re psychologically ready to have a woman a president?

ES
: We’re much more ready. We are ready. The difficulty is, again, that you have a system which is totally under-representative at all levels, so there are not as many people in the pipeline. And that pipeline is expanding, but extremely slowly. You don’t have as many governors to pick from, you don’t have as many United States senators, and so you don’t have as big a bumper crop. I think the first crack is the most important thing—that we get more people at the table! You have committees in Congress that barely have a woman on them. This is 2013! I’m sitting in Los Angeles right now, and there is a woman running for mayor, the first woman could be elected here in May, Wendy Greuel, who’s now the comptroller. However, there is a possibility that there will only be one woman on the city council. It’s just incredible, what’s happened. Greuel is in a very tight race. And so you are in better shape in New York where the first mayor, Christine Quinn—I think she is ahead, and there are more women on the city council, but in all these jobs it has been very, very tough going, because the parties are still extremely male dominated.

So what does that mean? Incumbents win more, right? So you’ve got to get yourself in position, but not only that. So often that seat, whatever it is—a state legislator’s seat, a governor’s mansion, a mayorship,
city council races—usually those seats have an incumbent team, which is totally male dominated, and frequently the seat then is given to that person’s son, to that person’s chief of staff, who is usually a male, et cetera. So it’s been tough.

Now, I remember when I first started in Washington as president of NOW in 1977, there were virtually no women chiefs of staff, so if the seats are going to be turned over to somebody, you’re not in line. That’s changed. There are a lot of women chiefs of staff. For example, Heidi Heitkamp just won in North Dakota. Where does she come from? She was chief of staff for one of the two senators. First she becomes chief of staff, then she starts running, then she becomes attorney general. You see what I mean? She got into the thing. More and more and more women are in the pipeline at different levels. Not as many as we should have. And that’s why I’m very much for all these committees—everything we have to encourage women to run, and, frankly, I think we should do less targeting. For years I’ve advocated flooding the ticket, meaning encouraging
a lot
of women to run. Because a lot of winning is luck. And you look at President Obama—he runs for Senate and the Democratic opponent in the primary gets into a sex scandal—boom, he’s gone. Then the general election was no shoo-in, but that opponent has a sex scandal. He had two sex scandals that helped him get the seat [
laughs]
, but what I’m trying to say is you can’t just sit back and say, “Well, we only have to take the sure races and we can’t afford too many . . .” and buh, buh, buh. You never know who’s going to have a heart attack, who’s going to have a scandal, who’s going to do this, who’s going to do that. And you shouldn’t discourage. You should say, go for it! We need more women and, obviously, someone who is qualified. I want a feminist woman. But you need more women in the pipeline, and you can only do that if you run and also you work your way up a little bit, but you run. You see yourself as a candidate and you’re willing to take chances. That’s life, and there are no sure things.

MS
: There have been a lot of studies about the fact that sometimes there are also psychological obstacles for women themselves, in terms of thinking they are qualified to run for office or seeing themselves in leadership positions. How much of a factor do you think that is?

ES
: Less and less, very much less, because basically there’s been all kinds of leadership training schools now. I can go through
so
many of them—Rutgers has it, American University has it, George Washington has it—and these are big training venues. Lots of nonprofits are doing it. A lot of nonprofit women have now made this their number-one priority. So we’re encouraging each other to run. We’re encouraging young women. We have a whole campus program—we’re on over 600 campuses—encouraging women’s leadership, feminist leadership, breaking down the stereotypes, giving people the trade secrets. And when I was a kid, you didn’t even know how to run. There was nothing. I’m a political scientist; there was nothing taught in political science about running. Now we have campaign management and training programs at various universities. None of that existed before, and now a lot more young women are taking it.

Another thing is we weren’t in professions that helped. In 1970, women were about 8 percent of the medical students and 3 percent of the law students. Well, just remember, a large portion of people running for office are attorneys. And now we’re about half the law students, and so it’s coming from all directions. President Obama’s judicial appointments are around 45–47 percent female. That would not have been possible when Bill Clinton was president; I think he appointed 26 percent and that was a lot, but there are so many more to pick from now. There are so many women in positions, so all this is
extremely
important. It’s not that everybody has to be an attorney—it’s just one of the easier ways to run, because you can get another job if you lose. It’s very hard. We do have the different backgrounds, and a lot of teachers, social workers—like Mikulski, who
was the first woman elected for the United States Senate in her own right in ’86, was a social worker. But it’s tougher to run from those bases because if you are in a job where your colleagues can carry you . . . in other words, if you can get some income while you’re running, you’re in better shape.

MS
: Why is it important that we have more women’s voices represented?

ES
: This I’m an expert on. All of it I’ve worked very hard on, but this I’m definitely an expert on. We thought when we were fighting for equal representation, that it was like, okay, we want equal representation—the police, the fire department, everything. You name the profession, we wanted it. It was job equality. It was taking a seat at the table. I don’t think we even realized in those earlier years that it would change the decision itself. In other words, it isn’t just equal representation for its own sake, although that’s okay. Why shouldn’t young women have the same opportunity as young men? We’re just as smart and all that goes with it. But also because life experiences are so different, based on gender—we bring a different vision to that table. When a woman is at that table discussing reproductive rights, she does have a different set of experiences and thought processes. Let’s face it, one may actually need to have an abortion or certainly use birth control and feel differently about it than a bunch of guys with totally different sets of experiences. And we thought for a woman to have an equal chance to be a police officer, we saw that as a job opportunity that paid better for blue-collar women—it certainly pays better than a social worker—and we saw it as an opportunity. Now we know that women police officers respond to domestic violence calls and take them more seriously than men do, on average.